[CharlesW]

> Arguably that's a GPU?

Yes, and to @quadrature's point, NVIDIA is creating GPUs explicitly focused on inference, like the Rubin CPX: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/nvidias-new-...

"…the company announced its approach to solving that problem with its Rubin CPX— Content Phase aXcelerator — that will sit next to Rubin GPUs and Vera CPUs to accelerate specific workloads."

[edude03]

Yeah, I'm probably splitting hairs here but as far as I understand (and honestly maybe I don't understand) - Rubin CPX is "just" a normal GPU with GDDR instead of HBM.

In fact - I'd say we're looking at this backwards - GPUs used to be the thing that did math fast and put the result into a buffer where something else could draw it to a screen. Now a "GPU" is still a thing that does math fast, but now sometimes, you don't include the hardware to put the pixels on a screen.

So maybe - CPX is "just" a GPU but with more generic naming that aligns with its use cases.

[bonestamp2]

There are some inference chips that are fundamentally different from GPUs. For example, one of the guys who designed Google's original TPU left and started a company (with some other engineers) called groq ai (not to be confused with grok ai). They make a chip that is quite different from a GPU and provides several advantages for inference over traditional GPUs:

https://www.cdotrends.com/story/3823/groq-ai-chip-delivers-b...